Hi Max,
I have a feeling that non-trivial/ useful visualisations, or rather visualisations of non-trivial subject matter tend to have lower prominence because their main aim isn't about looking nice and easily digestible (cf most of the stuff getting reblogged round the web) but getting information across in a way that reveals it's properties. Obviously looking nice helps in any visualisation but it's not something the designers here are particularly interested in (would they even think of themselves as deisgners? I suspect not). That the creators of the stadium evac video can assume a certain amount of audience engagement simply because of the subject matter probably reinforces the lack of need for visual polish.
Related: Lulu recently pointed out a job ad for ‘Associate Analyst – Infographics’ at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
http://lulupinney.co.uk/2011/01/impartial-and-objective-infographics/
-Tom

(title is a bit of a mouthful but can't be clear and concise *all the time*.) This is a simulation of a bomb attack on a sports stadium. It is used by emergency authorities to plan their response. More from this project here on the Redfish site.

(Most delayed response to a commebnt ever!)
I was not able to move all 10% of the votes to a party to another party, that is, to make a party rate +10%, another party rate -10% and the third one unchanged
That is possible Tic, but depending on what parties you choose it may be a two step process. Our ternary plot prototype showed it was really tricky to adjust accurately, moving the mouse in precise direction and increment over a 2d plane is much more chanenging than sliding it round a single dimension.
I recently wrote a blog post about the development of the app...
http://blog.pointlineplane.co.uk/post/2174827384/case-study-seat-calculator

Bernard L. sent in this chart a while ago, and with the looming British elections, it's a good time to show it, and ask readers how to spin this election. (Via Guardian) In particular, could someone help me understand the tri-color spinner? Given that the change in seats for the three pa...

Well, why is digital on the decline? What mysterious series are we missing there?
That's the problem with the chart, the area of the red digital section is actually getting larger but the steep overall decline serves to obscure this trend. As a previous comenter noted bringing the new values in from the bottom would address this problem a bit on this chart. Also the top line - overall sales - could be strengthened visually unifying all the subvesctions to empasise that this is overall figures. But yeah, the chart is flawed and the lack of information about whether this is inflation adjusted is really a killer.

I agree with Business Insider that the following chart is attractively drawn. It nicely illustrates the rise and fall of various music media over time. Area charts are more visually appealing than line charts, largely because line charts frequently leave large patches of white space. But one s...

This surname map of london is similar addresses some of the issues you have ...
http://spatialanalysis.co.uk/2011/01/24/mapping-londons-surnames/
... each surname is positioned on top of an area of roughly equal population.
The presentation method seems to work better at city scale where population is - very roughly - evenly distributed at least by comparison with the whole of the US.

Martha left a comment on my previous post asking my comments on this National Geographic word cloud map of surnames in the U.S. (Click on the link to look at the interactive map.) Here is a close-up of California: *** Anytime someone expands the possibilities of a chart type, like the w...

Hi, I built the BBC's version of this app so thanks for the kind words.
We tried several different interface mechanisms before settling on the pie-chart control. First up we tried a ternary plot with a moveable point, this had the disadvantage of being limited to 3 parties and we wanted to show 'others' in order to closely link the graphic to opinion poll data (or more specific parties in the future, perhaps for Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly election etc.). Also the ternary plot is perhaps a little bit esoteric for a general audience.
A set of sliders was unsatisfactory as the UI for locking unlocking different party sliders and determining from which party votes should flow to which other party was a usability nightmare where more than 3 sliders are concerned, plus there are potential editorial policy issues (i.e. we might be open to accusations of bias if by default votes transfered to a particular party).
I think the pie control is intuitive (whatever we think about pie charts everyone understands how they work) and the only real draw back is, as Kaiser points out, that unrealistic scenarios are available to users. We hoped to guide people as to what 'realistic' scenarios would be with the links to current opinion polls and historical vote shares. We considered limiting the range of the pie sections but where do you draw the lines? and in all honesty playing with the full range is sort of fun and hopefully illuminating as to the mechanics and shortcomings of the model.
With regard to the proportional representation, we chose that not only because the traditional geographic map gives the physically larger traditional Conservative and Lib Dem seats disproportionate visual prominence but also in order to further emphasise the crude nature of the uniform national swing model. For the same reason we don't give information on which hexagon represents which constituency (though the identities of some are obvious and most can be worked out by an astute reader with time on their hands).

Bernard L. sent in this chart a while ago, and with the looming British elections, it's a good time to show it, and ask readers how to spin this election. (Via Guardian) In particular, could someone help me understand the tri-color spinner? Given that the change in seats for the three pa...

I disagree that the taxation graphic is pointless. It does not obviously misrepresent the data and whilst it may be difficult to read specific data points from it gives an interesting and concise overview of US taxation system over the century. There are clear discontinuities corresponding with historical events; war, depression, the Reagan years.
That said, the chart is not "glancable", it requires the reader to engage with it (and it assumes some knowledge on their part), I think it rewards this effort.
If it's lacking anything I think it's in adding context to the data, perhaps a plot of how GDP or income distribution changed over the same time or marking key events which precipitated changes in taxation policy...

Have been getting a lot of reader suggestions lately. Thanks to all of you! Some of these, for various reasons, I won't be able to write full posts on. But they are still worth looking at. Julien D. invites us to interact with a different community, graphic designers -- that's graphics as in...

I think the problem here with decimals isn't just about readability but also implied accuracy. Inflation adjusted figures are never going to be precise facts, as inflation doesn't apply equally to all categories of goods or even all goods within a given category they're more like guides to aid comparison, show affordability in context.
Also what does bar thickness represent? Are the values shown as areas. Confusing.

The cost of the iPad gets the infographics treatment here. I feel a little weird about featuring this item. Helen E., who created the chart/poster, urged me to write about it. The link seems to connect to a commercial site but doesn't look too commercial -- and since the iPad fever is upon us,...

Stefan S. at the UNEP GEO Data Portal sent me some intriguing charts, made from data about the environment. The following shows the amount of CO2 emissions by country, both in aggregate and per capita. We looked at some of their other charts before. These "inkblot" charts are visually ap...